Jay Matthews:

I like much about United Teachers Los Angeles. The union had good reasons to strike for better working conditions in its district of 600,000-plus students. Teacher unions in general have benefited our country. Many of my favorite teachers were members, as was my mother.

Wall Street Journal:

Readers who still think teachers are striking over money should look at what just happened in West Virginia. A year after the state’s 20,000 teachers struck to get a 5% pay raise and no reductions in rich benefits, they walked off the job Tuesday to kill an education reform bill that would have increased school choice and accountability.

The West Virginia Education Association gave the walkout order to defeat legislation that would have allowed all of seven charter schools in the state over the next three-and-a-half years. The bill would also have created educational savings accounts for private or online schools and removed seniority as the only criterion for teacher layoffs. Competition and judging teachers by student performance are mortal threats to the union K-12 monopoly.

Sorry to say, Republican Gov. Jim Justice surrendered so fast that West Virginians should start calling him the former Governor. On Tuesday he promised to veto the reform if it passed, and legislators in the state House of Delegates shelved the bill indefinitely. The de facto Governor now is teachers union chief Dale Lee. The losers are the state’s children, who score below the national average in test results.

Greg Piper:

UC will continue slanted trials ‘until we are absolutely legally required’ to stop

California appellate courts have repeatedly affirmed the rights of accused students in campus sexual misconduct proceedings in recent years.

Three of the rulings came against the University of Southern California, including two less than a month apart.

As it becomes increasingly clear that their procedures won’t survive judicial scrutiny, California’s largest university system has slammed the brakes on Title IX proceedings and others are rushing to comply with the growing body of law, the Los Angeles Times reports.

Negassi Tesfamichael:

“We initially started as a way to create a safe space for black educators, whether it’s teachers, staff, anyone who has contact with children,” said Rachelle Stone, a fourth-grade teacher at Huegel Elementary School. “We first pushed the district to make sure the curriculum was culturally relevant. It wasn’t until this year that we focused on combating these incidents and white supremacy.”

Stone said the demands were aimed at teachers the group feels are unqualified to teach in the district.

“Our goal is to get at the root of the problem and really recognizing that there are some teachers who should not be in classrooms, that having them in our district is harming our black students when they use racial slurs and derogatory language,” Stone said.

Stone said she’s hopeful the district will hold itself accountable in light of these incidents.

“Teachers and anyone who is interacting with kids has to have an anti-racist mindset in order to dismantle white supremacy,” Stone said. “It’s not enough to say we’re are culturally competent because we did a read-along or have some posters. The district has a lot of work to do around that, whether it’s really changing the recruitment processes, how we deal with situations where a person is not working with black students, etc. The district has a lot to think about how it serves its black students.”

“The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

Lindsey Burke:

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., unveiled Tuesday a proposal to subsidize universal early education and child care through federal subsidies.

According to The Huffington Post, “no family would have to spend more than 7 percent of its household income on child care, no matter the number of kids.” Providers would have to meet safety and curriculum standards, and the proposal would be financed through a “tax on wealth.”

But the fact is that a new large-scale federal subsidy day care is unlikely to improve educational outcomes for children. It will cost billions—according to one estimate, $700 billion over 10 years for the Warren plan—and furthermore, it may not reflect the preferences of families when it comes to their children’s care in their formative years.

Although the Warren plan talks about day care subsidies rather than “preschool” subsidies, the reference to “curriculum standards” suggests the effort will be about more than child care for parents.

Warren’s plan reportedly calls for “requiring child care providers that receive federal funds [to] meet standards similar to those that now apply to Head Start.”

Well, Head Start is far from a success story when it comes to participant outcomes.

Econs.cn:

China’s Ministry of Education said on Friday that teachers in primary schools must not assign homework through the social media app WeChat or QQ messaging service, nor should they shift the duty of correcting homework to parents.

The statement was a written reply to a proposal submitted at the first session of the 13th National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), China’s top political advisory body.

Regional educational authorities in China have already introduced similar regulations amid a national initiative to free teenagers from homework overload.

Amy Harmon:

It was not an overt incident of racism that prompted Edray Goins, an African-American mathematician in the prime of his career, to abandon his tenured position on the faculty of a major research university last year.

The hostilities he perceived were subtle, the signs of disrespect unspoken.

There was the time he was brushed aside by the leaders of his field when he approached with a math question at a conference. There were the reports from students in his department at Purdue University that a white professor had warned them not to work with him.

One of only perhaps a dozen black mathematicians among nearly 2,000 tenured faculty members in the nation’s top 50 math departments, Dr. Goins frequently asked himself whether he was right to factor race into the challenges he faced.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

I will always remember my encounter with the writer and cultural icon Susan Sontag, largely because it was on the same day that I met the great Benoit Mandelbrot. I took place in 2001, two months after the terrorist event, in a radio station in New York. Sontag who was being interviewed, was pricked by the idea of a fellow who “studies randomness” and came to engage me. When she discovered that I was a trader, she blurted out that she was “against the market system” and turned her back to me as I was in mid-sentence, just to humiliate me (note here that courtesy is an application of the Silver rule), while her female assistant gave me the look, as if I had been convicted of child killing. I sort of justified her behavior in order to forget the incident, imagining that she lived in some rural commune, grew her own vegetables, wrote on pencil and paper, engaged in barter transactions, that type of stuff.

David Bandurski:

Gone are the days when you can simply ignore that stack of Party newspapers in the corner of the office, or switch off the Party’s nightly newcast, “Xinwen Lianbo.”

The app’s name, “Xi Study Strong Nation,” or Xue Xi Qiang Guo (学习强国), is derived from a now widely used official pun on the surname of China’s top leader. The surname “Xi” is also the second character in the Chinese word xuexi (学习), meaning “to study.” The app, designed and built by the Propaganda and Public Opinion Research Center of the Central Propaganda Department of the CCP (中共中央宣传部宣传舆情研究中心), an office previously known as the “Research Center on Ideology and Political Work” (思想政治工作研究所), is organised into several sections. These include, to name just a few, “Important News” (要闻), “New Thought” (新思想) and “Summary of Current Politics” (时政综合), all aggregating the speeches and statements of Xi Jinping, as well as audio and video content.

The platform has been designed with a built-in “Xi Study Points” system (学习积分系统) that allows users to accumulate points on the basis of habitual use of the platform, from reading and viewing of content to the posting of comments and other forms of engagement. It has been widely promoted by local governments and ministries and departments across China, and there have also been reports that some work units have ordered employees to attain specified point levels, with disciplinary measures to be imposed for those who fail to comply.

Here is one post to the official WeChat account of the district of Songhan (松山), in the Inner Mongolian city of Chifeng (赤峰), that reports on a “work training” for 170 Party and government employees on the “Xi Study Strong Nation” app.

Michael Gormley:

A series of tense, closed-door meetings during which Amazon was pressed to hire union workers at its proposed Queens headquarters preceded the company’s abrupt pullout on Thursday, which shocked even insiders, according to several people familiar with the discussions.

Two days before, in his 38th floor office in Manhattan on Tuesday morning, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo met with four Amazon executives, Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, and Mario Cilento, president of the New York State AFL-CIO.

The prize was clear: A promised 25,000 jobs with an average salary of $150,000, but Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio were urging Amazon to hire a union workforce.

The 8,000-word memorandum of understanding signed by Amazon and state and city leaders on Nov. 12 made no mention of unions or collective bargaining, and Amazon was, at the time, facing calls for strikes at its facilities in Germany and Spain.

That left perhaps the stickiest issue to be worked out, three months after New York was chosen for a headquarters in a nationwide competition for what would have been the state’s biggest economic development coup in history.

Erik Lorenzsonn:

Jones, a singer and one half of the local R&B duo Trend-N-Topic, has launched a national concert tour visiting children’s hospitals, in which she speaks to and sings to young patients. So far, she’s stopped at the American Family Children’s Hospital in Madison, and at St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. She has 10 other stops lined up.

She has also written an untitled children’s book on her life and hospital experiences, currently in production at the faith-based publishing house Faith Works.

Jones said her message with both endeavors is simple: “Hospitals aren’t as scary as they seem.”

She said she felt compelled to share her story with other children after a particularly prolonged hospital stay in 2017. Jones was hospitalized at American Family for a surgery to fix an untethering of her spinal cord. As with many of her operations, the procedure was high-risk: There was a 50-50 chance that the surgery would render her unable to walk again, she said.

Alexandre Tanzi:

Student-loan delinquencies surged last year, hitting consecutive records of $166.3 billion in the third quarter and $166.4 billion in the fourth.

Bloomberg calculated the dollar amounts from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s quarterly household-debt report, which includes only the total owed and the percentage delinquent at least 90 days or in default.

That percentage has remained around 11 percent since mid-2012, but the total increased to a record $1.46 trillion by December 2018, and unpaid student debt also rose to the highest ever.

Angela Misri:

I can see how it would be unsettling to be laughing with your friends, far from the eyes and interruptions of the adult world, when suddenly your mother takes over your computer screen and demands that you call her. What is it like to be a teenager whose mom knows how to remotely turn off your technology when you refuse to answer your phone, text, email, and FaceTime? Keep in mind, I’m the person who fixes my teen’s phone when they can’t figure out why their apps have disappeared. I’m the person who set up a Tumblr for them to upload the stop-motion videos I also taught them how to do. And I’m the one they’ll will come to when their first job requires them to learn the latest software.

It’s a common stereotype: if you need to figure out a new piece of technology, you hand it to the youngest member of the family. The media has been publishing articles about adults’ apparent tech ignorance for nearly two decades. In 2000, The Economist claimed the “family tech guru” was “far more likely to be a teenager than the father of the house.” Perhaps they should have checked with the mother, because that’s never been true in my house, where I live with my husband and sixteen-year-old kid.

Logan Wroge:

Madison students could face random and “as-needed” metal-detector screenings under a proposed policy being considered by a Madison School Board committee.

The proposal comes months after a student was injured in a shooting near La Follette High School, which resulted all students being screened with hand-held wands for two days.

The plan would establish policy governing the use of metal detector wands. No district policy on the use of metal detectors currently exists.

“It gives us another tool in our toolbox to keep schools safe,” said Joe Balles, the safety and security coordinator for the Madison School District.

Adam Kirsch:

The Bible is a refractory book, never behaving quite as we expect it to. Indeed, much of the creativity of Jewish tradition has been devoted to harmonizing the actual Bible with Judaism’s changing expectations of what it should be. The rabbinic genre of midrash tries to make sense of the text’s many narrative contradictions and ethical perplexities. The Talmud assumes that every word in the Torah is there to teach a point of halacha, while Maimonides insisted that the Bible actually teaches the same truths as Greek philosophy, though it uses an allegorical method that can easily mislead the ignorant. And the mystical Zohar, written in medieval Spain, says that if all there were to the Torah were its surface meaning, it would be easy to write a better book: It is only the hidden, esoteric content of the Torah that makes it sacred.

The one thing the Bible could not be, for most Jews throughout history and many still today, is mere literature. After all, literature is a secular art, a product of the human imagination, while the Bible is supposed to be a sacred text, the product of divine inspiration. Perhaps the first person to openly suggest otherwise was Baruch Spinoza, the 17th-century Jewish philosopher, who daringly wrote that the books of the Bible ought to be studied in just the same way we would study Greek and Italian poetry.

Rebecca Zucker:

With ever-increasing demands at work for both mid-level and senior leaders, the ability to execute and get things done is a key driver of success. But it can ultimately become a leader’s downfall, resulting in unintended costs for the individual, as well as for their teams and organizations.

The high levels of efficiency that allow highly task-focused leaders to be so productive often come at the expense of a more people-based focus. Things like building relationships, inspiring a team, developing others, and showing empathy can fall by the wayside. Highly efficient leaders often lose their focus on people due to a limiting belief that more people-focused activities will slow them down and impede their ability to execute, and to ultimately be successful.

The irony is that an intense focus on efficiency and getting things done (consistent with the pacesetting leadership style in Daniel Goleman’s classic Leadership that Gets Results) makes these leaders less effective overall. The result is often a negative impact on organizational climate and burnout of team members. In a 2017 study by Kronos and Future Workplace, burnout was highlighted as the biggest threat to employee engagement, with 95% of HR leaders citing it as a key driver of employee turnover.

Tyler Cowen:

The main reason Amazon as a corporate entity does not pay much in taxes is because the company so vigorously reinvests its profit. The resulting expensing provisions lower their tax liabilities, in some cases down to zero or near-zero. That is in fact the kind of incentive our tax system is supposed to create, and does so only imperfectly, noting that many economists have suggested moving to full expensing.

(NB: You can’t hate both share buybacks and profit reinvestment!)

Amazon pays plenty in terms of payroll taxes and also state and local taxes. Nor should you forget the taxes paid by Amazon’s employees on their wages. Not only is that direct revenue to various levels of government, but the incidence of those taxes falls somewhat on Amazon, which now must pay higher wages to offset the tax burden faced by their employees. Not everyone wants to live in NYC or Queens! (Do you agree with Paul Krugman’s charge that the Trump tax cuts are mainly a giveaway to capital? If so, you probably also should believe that the wage taxes paid by Amazon employees fall largely on capital.)

There is no $3 billion that NYC gets to keep if Amazon does not show up. That “money” was a pledged reduction in Amazon’s future tax burden at the state and local level.

Tony Webster:

The suspects in an Eden Prairie home invasion last October wore gloves, dressed in black, and covered their faces with masks. But despite their efforts to remain unseen, a trail of evidence was left behind — not at the crime scene, but with Google.

Knowing the Silicon Valley giant held a trove of consumer mobile phone location data, investigators got a Hennepin County judge to sign a “reverse location” search warrant ordering Google to identify the locations of cellphones that had been near the crime scene in Eden Prairie, and near two food markets the victims owned in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

The scope of the warrant was so expansive in time and geography that it had the potential to gather data on tens of thousands of Minnesotans.

The technique has caught the attention of civil liberties lawyers who worry such warrants — deployed increasingly by police in the Twin Cities and around the country — are a digital dragnet ripe for abuse, and that judges may not realize the technical details or broad scope of the searches they’re authorizing.

“What is so problematic is that it can scoop up completely innocent people who are in an area for legitimate reasons, and who should not be treated as suspects,” said Teresa Nelson, legal director of the ACLU of Minnesota.

Many taxpayer supported K-12 school districts use Google services, including Madison.

Robert Anderson:

There are several lines of criticism. One group worriesthat releasing such a ranking will create incentives for law schools to focus too much on scholarship as opposed to teaching or cutting tuition. I don’t have much to say to this group in this post, because that’s a broader debate. Another group worries not about placing greater priority on scholarship, but about the idea of quantifying scholarly impact. Although there are real problems with quantifying scholarly impact, that too is a different debate. Scholarly impact or reputation is already quantified, it’s just quantified through the use of a somewhat haphazard survey distributed by US News.

More, here.

Roland Li:

Teacher salaries range from $46,750 per year to $83,724 per year, according to school district data, which the union said is the lowest rate in Alameda County. The school district spends an additional $13,487 per teacher annually to provide full health benefits for educators and their families.

The pay is for 186 days a year, which works out to just more than 37 five-day weeks.

The school district is offering a 5 percent retroactive wage increase from 2017 to 2020. The teachers union wants a 12 percent raise over the same time period. Brown said teachers will strike for as long as it takes to reach a deal. In 1996, a strike by Oakland teachers lasted for five weeks.

A fact-finding report released Friday recommends 3 percent in retroactive raises for both the last school year and the current school year, and new wage negotiations for the 2019-20 school year. Each 1 percent salary increase for teachers would cost the district about $1.9 million per year. The recommendations by Najeeb Khoury, an arbitrator appointed by the state’s Public Employee Relations Board, are nonbinding.

The district plans to keep schools open and hire substitute teachers in the event of a strike, which would affect 36,286 students in 87 district-run schools.

Nico Savidge has more

Dell Cameron:

A misconfigured online database has exposed new details of China’s tyrannical surveillance apparatus, which the country’s government has used to further suppress one of its most persecuted populations.

In the past year, there’s been an uptick of reporting on China’s oppression of the Uyghurs. In August, for instance, Business Insider detailed how the mostly Muslim minority group, largely confined to China’s Xinjiang region, came to occupy “one of the most intrusive police states in the world.” That same month, a story in the Atlantic described how a million Turkic Muslims in China are being detained in so-called interment camps; forced, on top of being tortured and killed, to renounce the very faith that underpins their social identity—to adopt in its place a philosophy more consistent with that of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Here we see, at gunpoint, the involuntary “re-education” of entire communities and the manual obliteration of a culture through an apartheid predicated on extreme religious prejudice. Nothing could be worse.

Behind all of this is a grotesque technological achievement whereby billions of dollars have been poured into the intensive monitoring of a people who, by the sheer mathematics of it all, could pose no real extremist threat to the security of the Red Giant. There’s no question that China has unleashed a surveillance apparatus unprecedented in its scale to collect even the most granular details about the daily lives of its citizens. New examples of that seem to arrive each day.

This week, one security researcher reportedly found himself peering through the looking glass after stumbling upon a massive database reportedly controlled by a Chinese firm called SenseNets, which had inadvertently left its shades undrawn.

Stephen Chen:

A group of some of China’s smartest students have been recruited straight from high school to begin training as the world’s youngest AI weapons scientists.

The 27 boys and four girls, all aged 18 and under, were selected for the four-year “experimental programme for intelligent weapons systems” at the Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT) from more than 5,000 candidates, the school said on its website.

The BIT is one of the country’s top weapons research institutes, and the launch of the new programme is evidence of the weight it places on the development of AI technology for military use.

Erica Meltzer:

Over the last year or so, an education reporter named Emily Hanford has published a series of exceedingly important articles about the state of phonics instruction (or rather the lack thereof) in American schools. The most in-depth piece appeared on the American Public Media project website , but what are effectively condensed versions of it have also run on NPR and the NY Times op-ed page.

If you have any interest in how reading gets taught, I highly recommend taking the time for the full-length piece in APM: it’s eye-opening and fairly disquieting. While it reiterates a number of important findings, its originality lies in the fact that Hanford takes on the uneasy truce between phonics and whole language that supposedly put an end to the reading wars of the 1980s and ‘90s, and points out that so-called “balanced literacy” programs often exist in name only.

In principle, this approach recognizes that both development of sound-letter relationships and consistent exposure to high-quality literature are necessary ingredients in helping students become proficient readers. What Hanford does, however, is expose just how vast a chasm exists between theory and reality. In many schools, phonics is largely neglected, or even ignored entirely, while discredited and ineffective whole-language approaches continue to dominate.

Roni Dengler:

More than 21 million people worldwide suffer from schizophrenia, a profound mental illness that interrupts thinking, language and perception. Quite a few schizophrenic people experience delusions and hear voices. Many of the disease’s symptoms stem from faulty communication between brain cells. And, for decades, scientists have searched for a cure in the brain.

Now researchers say they’ve discovered that the way to heal schizophrenia might be through the gut. There’s an ecosystem of bacteria and microbes that live in our digestive tracts, known as the gut microbiome. And these may lead to some features of schizophrenia, an international team of scientists announced this week in the journal Science Advances. The discovery could revolutionize treatment options for schizophrenia.

Dean Mosiman:

As it plans a new, world-class facility, the Wisconsin Historical Society is bringing a statewide effort to get public input on the project to Madison for the first time this week.

The Historical Society and private developers, determined to fulfill a two-decade-long dream, are pursuing a striking new history museum with commercial and residential space above it on Capitol Square that could be the city’s biggest project ever.

The state, the Historical Society, Hovde Properties and landowner Fred Mohs have long eyed part of the block that fronts the Square and holds the current, undersized museum and surrounding properties for a joint redevelopment.

The Historical Society is pursuing a $120 million, 100,000-square-foot museum that would more than double exhibition space, and provide learning, meeting and flexible spaces with state-of-the-art technology that would attract 150,000 visitors annually. It would be topped by the Hovde-Mohs $80 million to $120 million private development bringing 200,000 to 250,000 square feet of commercial and residential space.

In recent months, the Historical Society initiated a series of more than 40 events to get input on the museum from diverse populations across the state.

archive.org:

Technical side-note: In 2017 your user profile is automatically flagged by a machine without human intervention. Your data gets categorized according to risk-profiles, and these are sold! Your ability to get a loan, mortgage, insurance or even job, already depends on it TODAY! It’s common knowledge that the price of your loan is automatically adjusted depending on the zip-code of your current address. If you live in the «wrong» place, you won’t get approved at all! The technology for this is already in place and it’s not some future scenario.

== Step-4 encrypt browser traffic

Making sure the connection between your device and the remote party (the website you’re viewing) is encrypted should be on the top of our list. The «HTTPS-Everywhere» extension checks first if a URL can be served over an encrypted connection whenever you click an insecure HTTP link. You should go ahead and install this!

Technical side-note:
For those of you who want to only visit sites that are encrypted and instead block everything that is coming from an insecure channel, there is another option which works in a similar way but instead of falling back to the insecure method doesn’t allow you to retrieve content over non-encrypted channels at all. This one you can get here. If in doubt just install HTTPS-everywhere and not this latter one. It’s important to see HTTPS as a very basic, crude method to protect you (albeit one you can’t live without). If HTTPS is the only encryption layer to keep your data safe then it’s no good in nearly all cases (beyond sharing cake-recipes). The reasons being the many ways that HTTPS gets broken by middle-boxes or caching providers (Cloudflare a popular CDN is probably the biggest MiTM on the web). If you care to dig deeper into the subject of trusting the Trust Industry, you’ll also have to question how trust is being sold as a product online today. From DigiNotar to StartCom/WoSign, the industry is a sham. Nevertheless all security standards are a compromise between vendors. And encrypting browser traffic with HTTPS should be a thing every website offers to their visitors. Just don’t rely on your secret being protected with HTTPS only as a user.

Joy Pullman:

With six weeks left until election day in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court race, several far-left organizations are using media outlets to amplify a smear campaign against a judge based on his Christianity. Brian Hagedorn, a current Wisconsin Court of Appeals judge and former Scott Walker legal counsel, is being publicly trashed for being on the board of a small Christian school, and for blog posts when he was in law school discussing court cases about abortion and gay sex.

In considering a run for the state Supreme Court, the father of five children says, “I expected to be attacked here because that’s what’s happening all across the country–you know, ‘Are you now or have you ever been associated with the Knights of Columbus?’” he said, chuckling. “Interrogating people [nominated for office] if they went to a Bible study or the Knights of Columbus, that’s where we are as a country.”

The media characterization of his writing is often misleading. For example, a ThinkProgress hit piece claims that, in a blog post paraphrasing former Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent on a case about Texas sodomy laws, Hagedorn “compared homosexuality to bestiality.” In fact, his post simply notes the U.S. Constitution has nothing to say about any supposed rights to sex with anyone or anything, then essentially paraphrases Scalia’s dissent, which two other justices joined.

Carlos Lozada:

Works of intellectual history come in a few varieties. There’s the Salon Book, the story of a like-minded clique coming together to develop a new philosophy or sensibility, or at least to take down old ones. Louis Menand’s “The Metaphysical Club,” on the rise of pragmatism, is the ideal of the form. Then there’s the Book Book, arguing that one particular title remade the world, shaped the century, upended the cosmos. Think of Randall Fuller’s “The Book That Changed America,” about the impact of Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” upon a nation verging on civil war. And there’s the Big Idea Book, painting a single, vital stroke across a vast canvas. Try Ibram X. Kendi’s relentless “Stamped From the Beginning,” on the arc of America’s racist designs from pre-colonial times to the new millennium.

These books are usually lengthy; intellectual historians have read a lot, after all, and they want us to read a lot, too. But “The Ideas That Made America” by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen is an anomaly in the genre. Its brevity is a point of pride, yet it aspires to do a little of everything. It covers various schools in America’s life of the mind, from transcendentalists to progressives, from the Harlem Renaissance to mid-20th-century conservatives. It dwells on the struggles of a young nation to affirm its own literary and academic traditions — to end, in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s complaint, America’s “long apprenticeship to the learnings of other lands.” It highlights essential works and scholars, putting them in conversation across time, and it surfaces the recurring strains in American intellectual life. “There is no period in American history when thinkers have not wrestled with the appropriate balance of power between self-interest and social obligation,” Ratner-Rosenhagen writes, identifying a central theme not just of her book but of the republic.

Ryan Patrick Jones:

The man whose family is at the centre of a measles outbreak in Vancouver said he didn’t vaccinate his children because he distrusted the science at the time.

In an exclusive interview with CBC News, Emmanuel Bilodeau said he and his then-wife were influenced by reports that linked the vaccine that prevents measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) with autism.

“We worried 10-12 years ago because there was a lot of debate around the MMR vaccine,” said Bilodeau. “Doctors were coming out with research connecting the MMR vaccine with autism. So we were a little concerned.”​​

The MMR vaccine prevents measles, mumps and rubella by helping the body make chemicals called antibodies to fight off the viruses. The BC Centre for Disease Control (CDC) recommends children receive two doses of the vaccine, one at 12 months of age and the second dose at five to six years of age.

There is no scientific evidence linking the vaccine to autism, says the CDC.

Bilodeau said he knows now the link between the MMR vaccine and autism has been debunked.

Joel Kotkin:

One can appreciate the economic benefits that firms like Uber, Lyft, Salesforce, and others have brought to San Francisco and other tech-oriented cities. Yet the concentration of high-end businesses has also helped create a neo-Dickensian reality: sky-high housing prices, widespread homelessness, and a rapidly shrinking middle class. There are now more drug addicts in San Francisco than high school students. Rising rents have undermined that city’s cherished bohemian culture and hastened a rapid decline in the minority population, both in the city and across the tech-dominated Bay Area. In 1970, 96,000 African-Americans lived in San Francisco; today, barely 46,000 make their homes there, constituting less than 5 percent of the city’s population. More than half of the Bay Area’s lower-income communities, notes a recent UC Berkeley study, are in danger of mass displacement. Amazon, it seemed to many progressives, threatened to bring the same conditions to New York.

Tech-dominated metros, though ostensible bastions of progressive values, increasingly resemble, as Wired recently noted, a “caste” system dominated by oligarchs and their key employees—“feudalism with better marketing.” Many working- and middle-class people have been reduced to joining the swelling “precariat” of temporary workers, while some have even slipped into the ranks of the homeless. Once dominated by manufacturing employment, Seattle has been transformed by Amazon, which has created nearly all the 60,000 new jobs downtown since 2010. The new housing demand, imposed on a highly restricted real-estate market, has driven metropolitan house prices stratospherically higher. All the signature San Francisco problems—homelessness, disappearing families, wealth inequality—are now all too evident in the Emerald City. Seattle’s African-American population has stagnated as the city has boomed and is losing its hold even in its traditional neighborhoods.

Seattle’s rising socialist political class did not cheer the city’s transformation. They have demanded that Amazon and other tech giants pay to alleviate homelessness and housing shortages. But Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, responsible for nearly 20 percent of the city’s office space, has the advantage of operating in America’s largest “company town.” When push came to shove, he could threaten to undermine the city’s entire economy in ways reminiscent of a mill-town company boss in the early industrial revolution.

Alia Malik:

Jason Mims speaks during an SAISD board meeting last year that appoved a contract with Democracy Prep, a New York-based charter school network, to operate Stewart Elementary School. The district is considering

Photo: Billy Calzada /San Antonio Express-News

Image 2 of 2

Shelley Potter, right, president of the SAISD teachers union, walks with attorney Martha Owen before a hearing at the Bexar County Courthouse last year during the union’s attempt to block the charter

Attracted by the prospect of more autonomy and better state funding under a new law that occasionally has led to controversy, principals of as many as 10 campuses in the San Antonio Independent School District are considering partnerships with outside organizations.

They include the district’s well-regarded all-girls school, the not-yet-opened CAST Med school and some with existing International Baccalaureate programs.

Senate Bill 1882, which took effect last year, allows schools to contract their operations out to nonprofit organizations, charter school networks, higher education institutions or government agencies.

Martin Vassolo & Elizabeth Koh:

One day before the first anniversary of the Parkland school shooting, Gov. Ron DeSantis on Wednesday asked the Florida Supreme Court to impanel a statewide grand jury tasked with examining and reviewing school safety measures in Broward County and across the state, “as well as the responses of public entities to laws designed to protect schools such as the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act.”

DeSantis appeared in Broward on Wednesday afternoon with several family members whose loved ones were killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas. He said the grand jury would be able to issue subpoenas, look into any potential failures and determine how the Broward school district and others carried out safety policies or used funds allocated for school hardening.

The grand jury would look for violations of the law related to Florida Statute 905.34, such as whether refusal or failure to follow a school-safety law put students at risk, if school officials diverted funds from “multi-million dollar bonds specifically solicited for school safety initiatives” or if officials underreported crimes to the Florida Department of Education. Florida’s high court confirmed receipt of the petition Wednesday evening, posting the document to its website.

Jon Mehlman:

We decided not to tell the kids. Marla knew that once our three daughters understood that their mother had been given 1,000 days to live, they’d start counting.

They would not be able to enjoy school, friends, their teams, or birthday parties. They’d be watching too closely—how she looked, moved, acted, ate, or didn’t. Marla wanted her daughters to stay children: unburdened, confident that tomorrow would look like yesterday.

Marla was my first and only girlfriend. We were introduced in October 1987, when we joined a coed intramural flag-football team in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I wasn’t very good with women, monosyllabic in their presence. We all went to a bar after one game, and I came home with a napkin on which I’d jotted down words to describe Marla: “Hot. Fast. Fun. Sweet. Flint.” Yes, flint as in Flint, Michigan—her hometown—but also flint as in flinty—steely, speedy, mighty, glinting.

A month later, I mustered the nerve to call her house phone (we only had landlines in 1987). We would spend the next 31 years together.

Marla could water-ski barefoot. I was a rabbi’s kid; I rarely even went on boats. She made a habit of taking me places.

Justin McCarthey & Jeffrey Jones:

Thirty-five percent of Americans name the government, poor leadership or politicians as the greatest problem facing the U.S. This is the highest percentage Gallup has recorded for this concern, edging out the previous high of 33% during the 2013 federal government shutdown.

Gallup has asked Americans what they felt was the most important problem facing the country since 1939 and has regularly compiled mentions of the government since 1964. Prior to 2001, the highest percentage mentioning government was 26% during the Watergate scandal. Thus, the current measure is the highest in at least 55 years.

The current percentage of Americans naming government as the most important problem is nearly twice as high as the 18% recorded in November. That increase likely reflects public frustration with the government shutdown that occurred from late December through most of January. Gallup observed a similar double-digit spike spanning the 2013 government shutdown, from 16% in September 2013 to 33% in October 2013.

Americans have different things in mind when they name the government as the most important problem. An analysis of the verbatim responses to the question from the latest survey finds that 11% of Americans specifically cite “Donald Trump” as the most important problem, while 5% name “the Democrats” or “liberals” and 1% “Congress.” About half of those who say the government is the most important problem — 18% of U.S. adults — blame both parties or cite “gridlock,” “lack of cooperation” or the shutdown more generally. The latter figure has grown from 6% in December and 12% in January.

Jon Mehlman:

We decided not to tell the kids. Marla knew that once our three daughters understood that their mother had been given 1,000 days to live, they’d start counting.

They would not be able to enjoy school, friends, their teams, or birthday parties. They’d be watching too closely—how she looked, moved, acted, ate, or didn’t. Marla wanted her daughters to stay children: unburdened, confident that tomorrow would look like yesterday.

Marla was my first and only girlfriend. We were introduced in October 1987, when we joined a coed intramural flag-football team in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I wasn’t very good with women, monosyllabic in their presence. We all went to a bar after one game, and I came home with a napkin on which I’d jotted down words to describe Marla: “Hot. Fast. Fun. Sweet. Flint.” Yes, flint as in Flint, Michigan—her hometown—but also flint as in flinty—steely, speedy, mighty, glinting.

Maria Temming:

Pondering a tablet screen displaying a town scene, a pre-K student tilts her head to the side and taps her lip thoughtfully.

“What are we trying to find?” asks the plush, red and blue robot called Tega that’s perched on the desk beside the girl. The bot resembles a teddy bear–sized Furby.

“We are trying to find lavender-colored stuff,” the girl explains. Lavender is a new vocabulary word. “OK!” Tega chirps.

The girl uses her forefinger to pan around the scene. She eventually selects an image of a girl — not wearing purple. The game puts a red mark through her choice: wrong.

The girl slumps down in her chair, head dropped to her chest as Tega says, “I’m sure you will do better next time. I believe in you.”

The robot, which MIT researchers are testing with students in a Boston-area public school, tilts toward the girl, who leans in close so that her cheek is right next to Tega’s.

Lillian Reed and Jeff Barker:

Salisbury University student has been charged with illegal wiretapping after prosecutors say he streamed a meeting with a congressional staffer for Maryland Rep. Andy Harris to Facebook Live without permission.

Jake Burdett, 20, was charged last week with two felony counts of making an illegal recording and distributing the video filmed during a Maryland Marijuana Justice rally at Harris’s Salisbury office in October, according to a news release from the state prosecutor’s office.

Marijuana legalization protesters have long tangled with Harris, who in 2014 worked to block full legalization of the drug in the District of Columbia. A protest outside the Republican’s Capitol Hill office last year led to the arrest of two demonstrators on charges of consumption of marijuana in a prohibited public space.

State prosecutors allege Burdett and other advocates at the Salisbury rally agreed to meet with a congressional staffer in his office, which could only seat a few people. When another member of Harris’s staff noticed several people on their phones, the group was told they were not allowed to record because of an office policy, the release states.

Logan Wroge:

Over the past three years at Madison high schools, while arrests have dropped and the number of citations has fluctuated, African-Americans continue to predominantly be those most cited or arrested, according to Madison Police Department data.

As the fate of a contract that stations police officers in high schools remains uncertain, Police Chief Mike Koval took to his blog Thursday to back the school-based officers and argue that the department’s data do not support a “school-to-prison pipeline” narrative that opponents say results in minority students being disproportionately put into the criminal justice system.

“While the numbers are at a point where we should still be doing a deeper drill to see how we can continue to improve and mitigate those numbers, the extent to which the ‘problem’ has been described, I think has been vastly exaggerated,” Koval said in an interview.

Koval attached to his blog post a report the Madison Police Department complied using data from the past three school years on the citations issued and arrests made at the district’s four main high schools — East, La Follette, Memorial and West — where a uniformed and armed police officer, known as a school resource officer, or SRO, is stationed during school hours.

“There is no question that the combination of school disciplinary practices and juvenile justice practices, working in interaction, have unnecessarily, disproportionately placed young people in the juvenile justice system,” said School Board member TJ Mertz.

Related: Gangs & School Violence forum

Carlos Fraenkel:

Though modern Stoicism has its roots in the culture of self-improvement, it also has more serious philosophical champions. One of these is Massimo Pigliucci, whose recent How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life proposes to bring Stoicism from “second-century Rome” to “twenty-first-century New York.” A professor of philosophy at the City College of New York, Pigliucci is best known for his work in the philosophy of science. In his latest book, he discusses his Catholic upbringing in Rome and his rejection of religion as a teenager. To find meaning in his life and, as he grew older, to prepare for death, Pigliucci tried out different systems of belief. Buddhism was “too mystical,” secular humanism “too dependent on science,” but Stoicism hit the spot. It was “a rational, science-friendly philosophy” that offered him an answer to the “most fundamental question: How ought we to live?”

In How to Be a Stoic, Pigliucci aims to demonstrate how we can use this philosophy to develop a moral character and attain peace of mind in three ways: by taking charge of our desires, by acting virtuously in the world, and by responding appropriately to events we can’t fully control. To update Stoicism for our 21st-century needs, he replaces its theology and cosmology with contemporary scientific views and applies it to the challenges we are likely to encounter in the modern world. Yet I question whether the core tenets of Stoicism can survive this reinvention—and even if they did, I remain doubtful that they provide the right moral and political framework for our time.

Elizabeth Janeczko:

The conclusion to renew the contract with MPD has come under criticism from those who oppose the presence of EROs in schools. To some members of the Madison community, the presence of police officers in schools poses physical, psychological and existential threats.

Freedom, Inc., a local advocacy group who testified at the committee meetings, opposes the contract with MPD. Bianca Gomez, gender justice coordinator of Freedom, Inc. and other members of Freedom, Inc., including youth of color, testified to the ERO Ad Hoc Committee about their concerns regarding the presence of EROs in schools.

Their opposition to the presence of EROs in schools is rooted in historical and present day assumptions by MPD that communities of color are crime plagued, at-risk, and in need of aggressive policing. Leaders of Freedom Inc. argue that these assumptions essentially criminalize actions by black and brown youth who receive more aggressive treatment by law enforcement and stiffer penalties in courts compared to their white peers for similar behavior.

Madison police and its school district “are standing in the way of liberty and justice and morality of black and brown people. I think they are scared of the reactions of white parents. They are privileging those fears,” Gomez said.

Opposition to the ERO program is found among white parents as well.

Kaleem Caire, via a kind email:

Madison, WI – One City Schools Founder and CEO Kaleem Caire — with support from One City parents, Board of Directors, and partners — is pleased to announce that One City’s plan to establish One City Expeditionary Elementary School in South Madison has been approved.

Last Friday, One City received notice from the University of Wisconsin System that its proposal to add grades one through six to its existing public charter school was authorized. One City will add first grade next school year and will begin enrolling children in grades 4K, 5K and first grade for the 2019-20 school year during its upcoming enrollment period: March 4 – 22, 2019.

With this expansion, next year, One City will enroll up to 116 students at its elementary school and 28 children in its 5-star, accredited preschool that currently serves children ages 1 to 3. At full capacity, the elementary school will enroll a maximum of 316 students.

Reviewers called the proposal “superior” and said the proposal “is very well developed and can contribute to school reform efforts to improve the quality of education for all students, especially those that are traditionally underserved.”

Kaleem Caire hailed the decision. “We took this proposal very seriously because we know the incredible stakes for our children and their families, and we are dedicated to establishing a new model of public education that holistically prepares children for a globalized economy and complex future. While our plans to grow vertically included consultation with a wide range of community partners, including the leadership of the Madison Metropolitan School District, our plans for our elementary school primarily grew out of a strong desire among our parents to continue their children’s enrollment in One City. They are 100 percent behind us, and we are honored to extend our commitment to their kids’ future.”

In January 2019, One City was accepted into the Expeditionary Learning Network of Schools by EL Education, pioneers of personalized and project-based learning. For over 25 years, EL has been bringing to life a three-dimensional vision of student achievement that includes mastery of knowledge and skills, character, and high-quality student work. EL promotes active classrooms that are alive with discovery, problem-solving, challenge, and collaboration.

One City is proud that is has kept its commitment to families and to the City of Madison. “We said we would open a school in South Madison, we said we would renovate a building, we said we would start kindergarten, and we have done it all in four years. Now, we are honored to meet this next commitment by allowing students to stay enrolled continuously,” said Caire.

One City has also partnered with the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s new Center for Research on Early Childhood Education (CRECE), UW Research Collaborative and the Wisconsin Center for Education Research (WCER) to launch a longitudinal evaluation of One City’s student outcomes. This research will inform the field of early childhood and K-12 education and provide valuable insight into the impact that preschool has on children’s outcomes as they persist through elementary and secondary school. A copy of the Evaluation Plan can be accessed by clicking here.

One City is supported by a Board of prominent leaders including:

Marcus Allen, PhD, Senior Pastor, Mount Zion Baptist Church
Robert Beckman, CPA, CEO, Wicab, Inc.
Bethe Bonk, One City Parent and Mental Health Therapist, Pathway to Wellness Community Clinic
Gordon Derzon, Retired President & CEO, UW Hospitals & Clinics
Carola Gaines, Badger Care Outreach Coordinator, UW Health/Unity and Past President, Delta Sigma Theta Sorority
Joseph Krupp, Owner, Prime Urban Properties and Food Fight Restaurant Group; Founder and former owner, Krupp General Contractors
Gloria Ladson-Billings, PhD,Retired Professor of Education and Kellner Family Distinguished Chair in Urban Education, UW-Madison
Lynn McDonald, PhD, Retired Professor of Social Work at UW-Madison and Middlesex University in London, and founder of the internationally acclaimed FAST (Families and Schools Together) Program
Jodie Pope Williams, One City Parent and Academic Advisor, Madison College
Noble Wray, Retired Chief, City of Madison Police Department

Note: Questions have been raised about One City’s fiscal impact on the Madison Metropolitan School District. Click here to review a memo that One City has prepared that explains its fiscal impact on MMSD, and the impact of other programs that MMSD supports financially.

Logan Wroge:

According to the One City expansion application:

One City will phase the new grades in over four years, adding first grade in 2019-20, second and third grade in 2020-21, fourth and fifth grade in 2021-2022, and sixth grade in 2022-23.

By the end of the expansion, One City plans to enroll 316 students across 4-year-old kindergarten through sixth grade. This school year, there are 63 children in the 4K and kindergarten programs covered under the current independent charter agreement, the majority low-income and students of color.

“As One City Elementary school is built out, we are committed to recruiting, reaching and serving a diverse population of families that reflect the demographics of immediate neighborhoods that we serve,” the application said.

Class sizes for 4K through first grade would average around 10 students, while grades two through six would average about 15 students

Related: Madison spends far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts, despite tolerating long term, disastrous reading results.

“The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”.

A majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School (2011).

Much more on Kaleem Caire, here.

Justine Lofton:

The board’s decision to replace VanLoon came after its performance evaluation of him in December resulted in a score of 2.41 out of 4.

A score of 2 means “minimally effective,” while a 3 is “effective.”

“Knowing that I’ve had effective or highly effective ratings for the past nine years, yes I was very surprised,” VanLoon, 53, said of the score.

The goal is to have a new superintendent in place by July 1, said board President William Funk.

A special meeting on the superintendent search will take place at 6 p.m. on Monday, Feb. 18, at the district’s administration office, 12322 Stafford St. in Ravenna. During the meeting, the board will discuss the search timeline, salary range, contract length and selection criteria.

Funk said he hopes to find a superintendent who can improve student performance on standardized testing.

“The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”.

Michelle Wong:

China’s family planning policies have been criticised after a couple’s bank account was frozen over unpaid fines imposed for having a third child, despite the country’s falling fertility rates.

The couple, from China’s eastern province of Shandong, failed to meet the deadline to pay the “social maintenance fee” of 64,626 yuan (US$9,500) to the local authority, the local court said on Sunday, and were denied access to the 22,987 yuan in their account as a result.

Shandong was reported to have the most newborns nationally in 2017, according to state news agency Xinhua, but a recent report by the21st Century Business Herald suggested the birth rate in the province may have dropped sharply in 2018, with many cities reporting declining figures.

China’s National Bureau of Statistics recorded a drop in the number of new births in 2018 to 15.23 million, from 17.23 million in 2017.

Telegraph:

Simon Norton, who has died from a heart condition aged 66, was an Eton-educated maths prodigy considered one of the greatest minds of the 20th century – until the mid-1980s, when he lost his position at Cambridge University and ended up living in squalor in a dingy Cambridge basement packed with bulging plastic bags and piles of bus timetables, living on a diet of tinned mackerel, Bombay mix and brinjal pickle.

In 2011 his story was told by Alexander Masters, his one-time Cambridge tenant, in The Genius in my Basement: The biography of a happy man, a comically affectionate portrait which in the end could not bridge the chasm between the outer and the inner man.

Simon Norton was born on February…

Scott Johnson:

“You just have to believe!” is the kind of trite line you’d expect in a kids’ movie about a magic talking dog. But it seems the phrase doubles as important advice for college professors. That’s the upshot of a huge study at Indiana University, led by Elizabeth Canning, where researchers measured the attitudes of instructors and the grades their students earned in classes.

Mind the gap

One of the disappointing problems in higher education is the frequent existence of an “achievement gap” between underrepresented minorities and other students. It seems to be the result of various obstacles that students face along the way, from stereotypes about which groups are naturally skilled in which fields, to cultural differences that make some students hesitant to seek help in a class, to a lack of advantages in primary and secondary education. A lot of things can get in the way.

So these scenarios don’t have to take the ugly form of a racist teacher outright telling a student they aren’t welcome. Many issues are unintentional and subtle. If a student has the perception, for any reason, that they aren’t expected to succeed, that can drain enough motivation to ensure that they don’t.

Simpson Street Free Press:

Simpson Street Free Press hosted an MMSD School Board Forum for Seat #5 on Feb. 16, 2019. Candidates fielded questions from MMSD students and parents. Voting for the primary races is on Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2019. You can find out where your voting poll is by visiting https://myvote.wi.gov/en-US/FindMyPol…. Thank you to all that attended!

Much more on the 2019 Madison School Board election, here.

Matthew Continetti: